The Ivy Tree (33 page)

I watched Adam Forrest with some awe as he crossed the shed and reached down a pair of these. There were two punnets of strawberries on a bench to the left of the window. ‘Enough, do you think?' he asked.

‘I think so.'

‘There may be a few more ripe, in the bed by the dove-houses. I can pick them, if you've time to wait.'

‘No, don't trouble. I'm sure there'll be enough, and I promised to get back quickly. Dinner's at half-past seven, and we'll have them to pick over. Look, I brought a basket. We can tip them all in together, and you can keep the punnets.'

‘It comes cheaper that way,' agreed Adam gravely.

I gaped at him for a second, for some absurd reason more embarrassed than at any time in our too-rapidly intimate relationship. Lisa hadn't mentioned money; I had none with me, and hadn't thought about it till now. I said, stammering: ‘I – I'm afraid I can't pay for them now.'

‘I'll charge them,' said Adam imperturbably. He reached for a notebook, and made a jotting on a meticulously columned page headed ‘Winslow'. He caught my eye on him, and grinned, and suddenly, in the shadowed shed, the years fell away, and there was the lover of the moonlit tryst, the actor of that early film. I caught my breath. He said: ‘Whitescar runs an account. They don't seem to have time to grow any vegetables there themselves . . . I doubt if anybody has even touched the garden' – he shut the book and returned it neatly to its place – ‘since you left. Careful! You're spilling those! What did I say to make you jump.'

‘You know quite well. You did it deliberately. You . . . got under my skin.'

‘That makes two of us,' said Adam; at least, that's what I thought he said, but he muttered it under his breath, and the words were swallowed as he turned his head quickly to the door, adding aloud: ‘I suppose this is Mr Seton?'

‘Oh . . . hullo, Donald. Yes, Mr Forrest's still here. Mr Seton, Adam . . .'

The men exchanged greetings. Donald said: ‘You got your strawberries?'

‘I did. Your dinner's safe. I told Mr Forrest you wanted to see him, Donald, but I managed to keep quiet about the reason.'

‘You needn't have done that.' He turned to Adam. ‘I don't know if Annabel told you, sir, but I'm an archaeologist; I'm attached to the Commission – the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments – and just at present I'm in charge of the work being done up at West Woodburn.'

‘I had heard that excavating has started there,' said Adam. ‘Just what are you hoping to do?'

‘Well, the Commission's job is to list and describe all existing Roman monuments, with maps and photographs and so on – to make a complete survey, eventually covering the whole country. It's worked on a county basis, and I'm one of the team assigned to Northumberland. We haven't got very far, yet, with this particular site; I've got some students from Durham and London working for me on the job, and we're now busy on a trial trench . . .'

I had got the strawberries all tipped into my basket, but lingered a little, interested to hear the outcome of what Donald had to say. He gave Adam a very brief account of the work he was engaged on, and then passed, with an admirably Scottish economy of time and words, to the business of the moment.

When he described how he had seen the ‘Roman stones' in the quarry, it was obvious that he had caught Adam's interest. ‘And you think it likely, if that quarry
was
originally Roman, that there may be some Roman buildings near by?'

‘Fairly near, at any rate,' said Donald. ‘There's nothing remarkable about the rock itself – the quarried rock – if you follow me. If it were marble, for example, you might expect it to be worked, even if it had to be carried long distances; but this kind of sandstone is the common local stone. If the Romans did start a quarry there, then they would do so for pure reasons of convenience. In other words, they were building locally.'

‘I see,' said Adam, ‘and am I right in thinking that there's nothing recorded hereabouts? I've never read of anything, though I've always been interested in local history.'

‘Quite right. There's nothing nearer than the camp at Four Laws, and, since that's on Dere Street, the materials for building it would certainly be taken from somewhere on the road, not right across country from here. So it did occur to me that, if the quarry was started here, in the peninsula, when the same stone occurs all along the ridge above the river . . . and is rather more get-at-able there . . . it did occur to me to wonder if whatever was built, was built on the peninsula itself.'

‘Somewhere in Forrest Park?'

‘Yes. I wanted to ask your permission to have a look round, if I may.'

‘With the greatest of pleasure. I'm afraid the Forestry Commission acres are out of my jurisdiction, but the meadowland, and the Hall grounds, by all means. Go where you like. But what exactly will you be looking for? Surely anything there was, will be deep under several feet of earth and trees by now?'

‘Oh yes. But I did wonder if you could help me. Can you remember if there's anything else in the way of a quarry, anything that might be an overgrown pit, or artificial bank – you know the kind of thing?'

‘Not at the moment, but I'll think it over. The only pit I can think of is the old ice-house near the Forrest Lodge. That's dug deep into the earth under the trees, but that can hardly – wait a minute!'

He broke off, his brows knitted in an effort of memory. I watched him half excitedly, Donald with the utmost placidity. Doubtless he was very much better aware than I was, that ‘discoveries' rarely, if ever, come out of the blue.

‘The ice-house,' said Adam. ‘Mentioning the ice-house struck a chord. Wait a minute, I can't be sure, but somewhere, some time, when I was a child, I think . . . I've seen something at Forrest. A stone . . . Roman, I'll swear.' He thought a moment longer, then shook his head. ‘No, it's gone. Could it have been the same ones, I wonder, that I saw? The ones in the quarry?'

‘Not unless there was a very dry season, and you probably wouldn't have noticed them unless they were even nearer the surface than they are now. Wouldn't you say so, Annabel?'

‘Certainly. And anyway, nobody but an expert could possibly have guessed those
were
Roman. They looked quite ordinary to me, and to a child they'd mean nothing at all.'

‘That's true. You can't remember anything more, sir? What made you think it was Roman stone? Why the ice-house? What is the ice-house, anyway?'

‘A primitive sort of refrigerator. They usually built them somewhere in the grounds of big houses, in the eighteenth century,' said Adam. ‘They were big square pits, as a rule, dug somewhere deep in the woods where it was cool. They had curved roofs, with the eaves flush with the ground, and a door in one end, over the pit. People used to cut the ice off the lake – there's a small pool beyond the house – in winter, and store it underground in layers of straw, to bring out in summer. The one of Forrest's in the woods near the old lodge.'

‘Then you may have seen this thing there, surely? It was quite usual for later builders to lay hands on any Roman stones they could, to use again. They were good blocks, well shaped and dressed. If there were a few left stacked in the old quarry, above water level, a local eighteenth-century builder may well have taken them and—'

‘The cellars!' said Adam. ‘That was it! Not the ice-house, we weren't allowed in; it wasn't safe, and it was kept locked. We weren't allowed in the cellars, either, but that was different; they were at least accessible.' He grinned. ‘I thought there was something surreptitious and candle-lit about the memory, and it also accounts for the fact that we never mentioned it to anyone. I'd forgotten all about it until this moment. Yes, I'm fairly sure it was in the cellars at Forrest. I can't remember any more than that, except that we were rather intrigued for the moment, as children are, by the carving on the stone. It was upside down, which made it harder to make out what it said, even if we could have—?'

‘What it
said
?' Donald's voice was sharp, for him.

Adam looked surprised. ‘Yes. Didn't you say the stones were carved? There was some sort of lettering, as far as I remember, and a carving of some kind . . . an animal.'

‘I said “chiselled”, not “carved”,' said Donald. ‘If you're right, it sounds as if you may have seen an inscription. All I saw were the ordinary tooling-marks on the stone, the marks made by dressing with chisels. Like this . . .' He fished in his inside pocket, and came out with a thick wad of papers. There seemed to be (besides a wallet, several dozen letters and a driving-licence) an Ordnance Survey map of the North Tyne, and a thin booklet of what looked like – but surely could not be – logarithms. Donald looked at them vaguely, selected an old envelope, on which I distinctly saw a postmark two years old, and restored the rest to his pocket.

Adam handed him a pencil. ‘Thanks. This', said Donald, drawing with beautiful economy and accuracy on the dog-eared envelope, ‘is something like the stones I saw.'

He handed the paper to Adam, who studied it. ‘I see. No, that conveys nothing to me; I'd never have known that was Roman . . . not even now, let alone ten years old. Well, the obvious thing to do is to go and look, isn't it? This is really rather exciting. If it turns out to be an inscription of the Ninth Legion or something, will Forrest's fortune be re-made?'

‘Well,' said Donald cautiously, ‘you might get it on to TV . . . The house is a ruin, isn't it? Is it still possible to get into the cellars?'

‘I think you'll find you can get down. I don't have to tell you to watch yourself: I'm not sure what sort of condition the place is in. But you may certainly go just where you like. Look, I'll make you a plan.'

He reached to the nearby shelf for paper – it looked like an invoice-form – and spread it on the bench. Donald handed back the pencil. I came to Adam's elbow to look. He drew a couple of lines, then, with a subdued exclamation of irritation, pulled off the cotton gloves, dropped them on the bench beside him, and picked the pencil up again. ‘I can't write in them. Do you mind?'

‘Mind?'

Then I saw. His hands were disfigured, most horribly, it must have been by burns. The skin was white and dead looking, glassed like polythene, and here and there were puckered scars that showed purple; the shape of his hands, like the other bone-structure, had been beautiful, but the injuries had distorted even that, and made them hideous, things to shock. Things to hide, as, until now, he had hidden them. This was something else that the romantic moonlight had not revealed.

I must have made some small sound, some little gasp of indrawn breath. Adam's pencil checked, and he looked at me.

I suppose most people stared like that, sick and shocked, for a moment or two, then looked quickly away, saying nothing, talking of something else, pretending not to have seen.

I said: ‘Adam, your hands, your poor hands . . . What did that to your hands?'

‘I burned them.'

The fire at Forrest. His wife.
‘The bed was alight by that time. He managed to drag the bedclothes off her, and carry her downstairs . . .'

He had reached one of those terrible hands for the discarded gloves. He hadn't taken his eyes off my face. He said gently: ‘I'll put them on again. I'm sorry, I forgot you wouldn't know. It's rather a shock, the first time.'

‘It – it doesn't matter. Don't, for me . . . I – I've got to go.' I reached blindly for the basket. I could feel the tears spilling hot on to my cheeks, and couldn't stop them. I had forgotten all about Donald, till I heard him say ‘Here,' and the basket was put into my hands. I said shakily: ‘I've got to hurry back. Goodbye,' and, without looking at either of them, my head bent low over the basket, I turned and almost ran out of the packing-shed.

I was conscious of the silence I had left behind me, and of Adam, straightening abruptly, the pencil still in his hand, staring after me.

14

As it turned out, there were more than enough strawberries for supper. Julie didn't come back.

The dinner, though delicious, could hardly be said to be festive. It was as if all the accumulated tensions of the last days had gathered that evening at the dining table, building slowly up like the thunderheads that stood steadily on the horizon outside.

Con had come in early, rather quiet, with watchful eyes, and lines from nostril to chin that I hadn't noticed before. Grandfather seemed to have recruited his energies with his afternoon rest : his eyes were bright and a little malicious as he glanced round the table, and marked the taut air of waiting that hung over the meal. It was his moment of power, and he knew it.

If it had needed anything to bring the tensions to snapping point, Julie's absence provided it. At first it was only assumed that she was late, but, as the meal wore through, and it became apparent that she wasn't coming, Grandfather started making irritatingly frequent remarks about the forgetfulness and ingratitude of young people, that were intended to sound pathetic, but only managed to sound thoroughly bad tempered.

Con ate more or less in silence, but a silence so unrelaxed as to be almost aggressive. It was apparent that Grandfather thought so, for he kept casting bright, hard looks under his brows, and once or twice seemed on the verge of the sort of edged and provocative remark with which he had been prodding his great-nephew for days.